The Canadian Pork Council expects to have a new national swine tattoo system in place by next year to improve the traceability of market hogs.
“We’ve developed a system that is not too cumbersome on the producer,” said Francois Bedard, technical affairs specialist with the council. “So it will use existing methods of tattooing and existing numbers that are used.”
The tracking system will organize interprovincial pig movement by assigning each province a number to act as the last number in a five-digit tattoo code.
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That digit will help track an animal’s province of origin while the remaining four digits will identify the exact property and producer the animal comes from.
The tattoos will be identifiers within a new national livestock identification and traceability system.
Neil Ketilson, general manager of Sask Pork, welcomed the changes.
“Well, I don’t think it’s going to be an insurmountable problem. We’ll phase it in over a little bit of time when we do it,” Ketilson said. “We’re thinking sometime toward the end of next March, early April.”
At the moment, no formalized, Canada-wide regulations exist for number selection, which leaves tattoo codes vulnerable to duplication and makes it difficult to track animals properly.
“There might be some instances that some market hogs that go to a plant might bear the exact same tattoo number and they might come from two different provinces,” Bedard said.
Small numbers embedded with spikes are placed on a hammer-like tool and dipped in ink. The producer slaps the hammer on a pig’s shoulder to create a permanent tattoo.
Bedard hopes the new system will solve the problem of duplication.
“The tattoos will have to be unique per location and per producer.”
Ketilson believes the financial burden to producers will be minimal.
“Each one of the numbers only costs about $2,” he said. “They are frequently changed anyway, because they tend to get dull.”
Sask Pork is working on the system and Ketilson said a registry will allocate tattoo numbers to producers.
“People in the future who want to raise hogs and sell them in the province will have to come to us and get a tattoo number,” he added.
Jeff Clark of Manitoba Pork said 15 percent of tattoos are duplicated in Canada. He sees the benefits of the new system, especially in terms of contagious diseases.
“If there’s a disease outbreak, we want to be able to trace it back to the farm it originated from,” Clark said. “Using the tattoo number, we can trace back immediately.”
The Canadian Pork Council has planned consultations with provincial pork organization but it will be up to each province to inform producers of the necessary changes.
There are more than 30,000 pork producers in Canada producing more than 17 million hogs a year.
